Two inventions made the modern city possible: the steel frame and the safe passenger elevator. In Chicago after the great fire of 1871, architects began building tall office buildings on iron and then steel skeletons. A wall no longer had to hold up the building; it could be a thin skin hung on the frame, with big windows. (Compare the thick bearing walls of Baroque and earlier buildings.)
Looking closely: the Wainwright Building
Describe. A ten-story red brick and terra-cotta office block, with a solid base of two stories, a middle of tall, closely spaced vertical piers between windows, and a deep cornice at the top covered in leafy ornament. Analyze. The piers run up without a break, stressing height, and the building reads in three parts like a classical column: base, shaft, capital. Inside, a steel frame carries the loads. Interpret. Louis Sullivan (1856 to 1924) wrote in an 1896 essay that a tall building "must be every inch a proud and soaring thing," and that "form ever follows function," which became the slogan "form follows function."
Key idea
Common mistake
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 to 1959), who had worked for Sullivan, designed houses that hug the land. His Prairie style houses near Chicago, like the Robie House (1909 to 1910), stretch out in long, low horizontal lines with overhanging roofs. At Fallingwater, designed in 1935 as a weekend house for the Kaufmann family of Pittsburgh, he set the house over a waterfall on Bear Run. Concrete terraces cantilever out over the stream, anchored to a stone core, so the house seems to grow from the rock.
Art Deco and the machine age
Art Deco, named after a 1925 Paris design exhibition, used bold geometry, zigzags, sunbursts and shiny materials. The Chrysler Building (1928 to 1930), by William Van Alen, rises 1,046 feet to a stainless-steel crown of stacked arches and a needle spire; for about a year it was the tallest building in the world, until the Empire State Building opened in 1931. In Europe, Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye (1928 to 1931) and the Bauhaus pushed toward plain white boxes on slender columns, with no ornament at all.
Why it works
Worked example: Wall or frame?
- A wall that thin could not carry 77 stories of weight.
- A steel frame inside carries the loads.
- The brick and glass are a curtain wall hung on the frame.
Answer: Its steel frame.